Community Strategy
Make the World a Better Place
At Overlap, we don't just consult; we design for good. Our Community Strategy approaches are deeply rooted in human-centered design, a philosophy that is empathy-fueled, iterative, and collaborative.
Overlap offers a powerful approach to authentic and meaningful community engagement, and a robust process to lead change management. Our methodology is driven by our passion for complex problem-solving and creating a positive impact in our world.
We place stakeholders and their shared goals at the heart of our process, fostering an inclusive and accessible environment for strategic thought and action.
Overlap’s Community Strategy initiatives are typically large-scale, engagement-led initiatives for the development of robust, long-term plans that drive transformation and make a significant impact in the communities being served.
Through this work, we enable organizations to reconnect with their purpose and the people they serve.
How We Work
Design methods enable us to involve interest holders as collaborators—leveraging their experience and creativity, and building buy-in as we go. Drawing on the discipline of design, the deliverables we generate from engagement are purpose-built for synthesizing insights about human needs and presenting them in a way that prioritizes action.
Engagement Planning
All of our Community Strategy work begins with a robust planning phase. We’ll host your team to discuss interest holders to engage with and build our understanding of what we want to learn through engagement. A focus on communities that are often left out of engagement and those who experience systemic barriers to participation will ensure an equitable engagement approach.
Sense-Making
The goal of our sense-making approach is to distill meaningful insights that not only reflect the current environmental landscape but also provide foresight into potential shifts. We analyze the collected data and produce deliverables that meet your organization where you’re at–providing a useful tool to move forward with.
Human-Centred Engagement
By applying a human-centred design approach to engagement, we open up a range of innovative and leading practices for involving interest holders—including understanding initial needs and problems, generating ideas together, and prototyping and testing new concepts.
Actionable Insights
Understanding your interest holders’ needs is the first step. Now, it’s time to create a plan to address them. Overlap introduces a unique co-design approach to combining facilitation, training, and human-centered design principles. We’ll guide your team to create a plan rooted in what we’ve learned.
Sectors we work in
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We work with a variety of public and social profit organizations to better understand the needs of their communities and design programs that work best for them. Ask us how to bring your service users into your design process.
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Working within complex systems, and engaging your team and other interest holders can lead to a powerful understanding of potential actions and their implications.
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Your people are the key to understanding your challenges and opportunities. Let us show you how to bring them into the process with a robust engagement and co-design strategy.
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Complexity in healthcare can easily be overwhelming. Our co-design process brings service users, staff and other interest holders together to design a path forward within system constraints.
Stories from Our Clients
What to learn more about working with Overlap?